


state your business

by deniigiq



Series: Dumpster Fires Verse [17]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Existential Crisis, Gen, Social Justice, Soul-Searching, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, actual discussions of philosophy and justice, just a little
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 06:43:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15902979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “I can’t think like that.”“That’s your choice then,” Wade said. “But don’t drag the rest of us into it.”(Equality and justice are two different things; Matt and Wade try to explain with varying levels of success.)





	state your business

**Author's Note:**

> a few references to child abuse below. Please do what you need to to keep yourselves safe, as per usual.

Spidey tripped over the guy, which was the only reason they found him to begin with. They thought he was homeless at first, but then they noticed the watch.

Ain’t no one need a watch that fucking nice.

Spidey told him off for trying to ease it off the corpse before the cops got there. He did not accept any of Wade’s arguments, not even the one about orphans.

“Orphans don’t exist anymore,” Spidey decided.

Untrue. On multiple counts. Arrest him, officer.

“They do,” he maintained.

“Dude, I’m not arguing with you about orphans over a dead guy,” Spidey said.

Wade didn’t see why not. Man wasn’t exactly in the business of having an opinion anymore.

“Oh my god, _Wade._ ”

Spidey made them sit on the curb until the police got there because he said that they needed to give as much information as they could in case the guy had been murdered. Wade found this highly unnecessary. No shit, he’d been murdered, and Wade could solve the case right now. Victim was some kind of high roller who ain’t paid his monthly mob-rent and got his ass tanked trying to smooth talk his way out of it. Case closed. Where was his fucking medal?

Spidey didn’t think that was how it worked. He was wrong, but Wade let him have his delusions. He did, however, request that they move up high, but Spidey was insistent that he wanted to stay down on the ground.

Wade had a very bad feeling about this.

The cops rolled up and started poking and prodding the corpse. Throwing up yellow tape and road cones all over the damn place.

One of them looked up and noticed the red spandex and started to make her way over. Spidey stood up to greet her but didn’t have the opportunity.

Wade knew that walk.

By the time she got to where they’d been sitting, they were both gone and her handcuffs still empty.

 

“What the hell?” Spidey spat at him, all puffed up and indignant, ungrateful in the face of Wade’s heroism. And being dumped on his ass from a height to concrete. “We needed to talk to her, Wade. That guy—”

“Talk to her in a cell? Is that what you wanted to do?” Wade asked.

Fucking kids this days. Ain’t got the sense God gave a goat. Or did goats get their power from Satan?

“She wasn’t gonna arrest us.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Wade, not every cop—”

“Hey, let’s maybe not talk about shit you don’t know.”

He hadn’t meant for it to come out as confrontational as it did.

“I know about cops, dude. They try to arrest me all the time.”

“You know about cops,” Wade repeated. Just to make sure he was hearing this right.

“Yeah,” Spidey said, his voice breaking a little. Wade snorted.

“You ain’t know shit about cops, kid, but it’s cute you think you do,” he told him.

Spidey hackles went up.

“I know enough about cops to know when to report a fucking murder, Wade,” the kid spat. “That guy could have been lying out there for hours before someone found him.”

Honey, are you seriously you trying to argue morality with Deadpool?

Wade would have hoped he’d understood by then that Wade was nothing if not shades of gray chaos.

He was careful not to fold his arms, even though they really wanted to sit against his ribs. He stayed up on the high point of the roof, one toe braced on the step of the edge, keeping some distance between himself and Peter and the trash collected in the little refuge below.

“You seriously think they were just gonna take your statement, Spidey? Ha. No. Lemme tell you what was gonna happen. They were gonna stomp on over there and put you in cuffs and arrest your dumbass for that fuckhead’s murder. You know why? Because you’re a fucking vigilante and you put your damn ass at the scene of the crime, standing over a dead man’s body.”

Wade could see the moment it finally started to dawn on Spidey that maybe he hadn’t thought that shit through and maybe Wade did know what he was talking about. The hackles started to fall, eyes widened a bit. Christ. Wade was a lot of things, but he wasn’t actually stupid.

“What were we supposed to do, then? Leave that guy there ‘til the cats ate him?” Spidey demanded.

“Basically, yeah. It ain’t our job to drum up the city’s dead every night. At least, it ain’t my job and I don’t intend to make it. And honestly, Pete? Some people deserve to rot in an alley for a minute or two for all the shit they’ve done. They ain’t all worth saving.”

“You don’t know that.” Flat and firm with conviction.

Hollow conviction.

It was a magic trick which managed to fool even the wind for a second.

But it didn’t fool Wade.

He sighed and climbed down from his higher perch so that he could sit next to Spidey. He wasn’t the one supposed to have this conversation. He didn’t have the right words in the right order.

“You don’t know that,” Spidey said softer to the concrete between his knees.

God, kid.

He only had a handful of sounds to explain because everything else that mattered came in the form of an ache.

“Peter,” he said, “I do know that.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re just saying that. People just say that. It’s not cool. It’s not useful.”

“Peter.”

“Stop saying my name.”

“If nothing else, baby boy, I know this.”

“Why are you talking like this?” Spidey asked, as though extra words would fill in the terrible fucking maw of disappointment. Despair. Inevitability.

Wade wrapped his elbows around his knees and watched the plastic bags trapped in the fence on the edge of the rooftop. They billowed and flattened, like ripples on water.

“I don’t want to think like that,” Spidey told him.

One of the bags tried hard to work itself loose. A white one trapped by one of its own handles. It blew up like a balloon and strained when the wind caught it.

“I can’t think like that.”

“That’s your choice then,” Wade told the bag. “But don’t drag the rest of us into it.”

 

 

“The kid’s upset,” Red informed him with blood on his helmet. It wasn’t his and he didn’t seem bothered, so Wade let him bask in the aftermath of his fury.

“Kid’s delusional.”

“Something about cops.”

“Yeah, fuck the cops.”

“Yeah, fuck the cops,” Red agreed. It made Wade grin.

“Is there really a feud ‘tween cops and defense attorneys?” he asked. Red huffed a laugh that blew away in the wind. It was starting to smell like dried leaves, even up high where they were with the plastic bags.

“Fogs bribes them like a champ,” Red said. He sounded proud.

“Doesn’t sound very feud-y.”

“Guy called Mitchell told me he’d volunteer to identify my body when it comes to it.”

Wade whistled.

“Now, that’s what I’m talking about.”

Red laughed and grinned up at the sky.

“His people have been kind to him,” he said, his grin fading into the corners of his lips, “He trusts easily. The rest of us have old bones.”

Old bones.

More like old bones to pick.

“All my bones are like, ten days old at most, Red.”

The smile dropped out of the corners of Red’s mouth.

“I wish he didn’t have to hurt to learn.”

Yeah.

Yeah, that about hit the nail on the head.

“I may have fucked this one up,” Wade admitted. Red tipped his head forward and reached up his hands to pull off his helmet. His hair immediately started tossing in the wind. His eyes dark in the shadows.

“I’ll talk to him,” he said evenly.

 

 

Wade caught only the second half of the conversation because he’d tried to be respectful for the first. He’d still managed to arrive too early in a strange twist of fate that escaped even his understanding.

“—don’t get to choose which life is worth more than another,” Red was saying, with all the right words in the right order.

“But we _do_ choose,” Spidey argued without heat.

“We aren’t gods, Peter.”

“Thor is.”

“I look like Thor to you?”

The kid laughed.

“Do you even know what Thor looks like?”

“Got on good authority he’s a blue-eyed blonde, for your information. And furthermore, I collect those kind of people, so fuck you.”

The kid laughed again.

Did they have a class for charming your audience at law school or something?

Spidey’s laugh died off. He was either swinging his feet or rubbing his palms across his thighs.

“I don’t want to make that call,” he said.

“Okay, so don’t,” Red replied with ease. “Just know that that means that your victim’s life and your perp’s life are equal according to this scale. If you’re cool with that, go for it. Live your truth or whatever. I personally can’t. Kids aren’t very heavy, you know?”

“What do you mean?” Spidey asked hesitantly, unknowingly for Wade as well.

“Well, I mean, kids just aren’t very heavy. On my scale. But my rules are inverse. I gotta go with the side that’s the lightest, ‘cause nine times out of ten, I’m the one who’s gotta provide the extra weight. The other guy, he doesn’t need me, he’s doing alright on his own.”

Red, what the fuck kind of riddle shit is this? Just tell the kid what you mean.

Or don’t.

Maybe that’s how Wade fucked up here.

Oh, that’s definitely how Wade fucked up here. Good going, Red, using that fucking noggin of yours.

“Why are kids especially not very heavy?” Spidey asked quietly, as though he already knew the answer.

Red didn’t respond for a long moment.

“Have you ever been held down, Peter?”

“Yes.”

“By who?”

Yes, by who, so Wade could go find them and break every bone in their body.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

And all their fucking cartilage.

“You’re the one who asked, kid.” Red must have switched into lawyer mode because all his usual rage was all plastered over securely in his voice. His soft “we’re going to help” you voice made Wade feel uncomfortable and kind of inadequate.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it either, but you asked and it’s important.”

Spidey didn’t say anything.

“A man held me down,” Red told him softly, steadily, as though he was speaking to himself in a mirror. Except Red would never use a mirror. How did he reach himself? “And he told me it was for my own good. And he told me not to fucking cry about it.”

“He hurt you?”

“He hurt me.”

“Like--?”

“No, that was someone else. They held me down, too. I wasn’t a very big kid.”

Spidey made a noise.

“It’s okay, Peter.”

“It’s not,” he hiccuped, muffled by hands.

“No, it’s not, but it is. It has to be, otherwise I couldn’t do shit, do you understand?”

“I understand,” the kid stuttered.

“Wade wasn’t trying to scare you,” Red said with conviction. Solid, soft conviction. The surface of polished stone. “Or piss you off or put you down. We don’t want to bring you down. But you’ve gotta understand the ramifications of your decisions. It’s one thing to treat all lives as equal, it’s another to achieve justice.”

Another noise, one that made the muscles in Wade’s legs flinch and his stomach drop a little bit.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Red crooned. “Alright, c’mere. C’mon, bring it in. Ugh, you’re all gross. Everything happening is gross. Wade, stop being a creep. Get over here, I am emotionally constipated.”

Spidey huffed out a laugh through his tears and Wade pulled himself up to where they were sitting. Red was not emotionally constipated. He was problem-solving and he deserved that fancy degree of his and Wade was gonna buy him two drinks for putting that shit right. Wade sat down and was immediately besieged by Spidey’s willowy limbs.

Peter buried himself into his neck and tried to even his breathing. He sniffed and rubbed a wrist over his face while pressed up against Wade’s shoulder.

“I don’t wanna leave people in alleys,” he sniffed.

“I get that, baby boy,” Wade promised him. “But I don’t wanna see you get arrested for getting involved in some shit that don’t need it.”

Peter swallowed and nodded.

“How do I know if it needs it?” he asked.

“You ask me because that was _my_ mobster who got tanked over there,” Red cut in irritably. “And also conveniently my informant and now I’ve gotta go scare another guy shitless, and the family is going to start getting _suspicious_.”

“Or,” Wade offered, to keep the kid from thinking he was serious, “You do your homework and start learning who’s who and how you know in your area.”

Red pouted and when Spidey looked to him for confirmation, he threw up his hands.

“I _guess_ ,” he admitted.

The kid laughed and nodded and let go of Wade.

“I’m good at homework,” he noted.

Yeah, you are kiddo.

 

 


End file.
